The Magnificent Bastards (39 page)

Alpha Annihilator’s two reaction platoons moved cautiously toward Nhi Ha, taking individual enemy soldiers under fire along the way. Lieutenant Smith’s Alpha Two was on the right flank and Alpha Three, led by 2d Lt. William B. Kimball, was abreast on the left. Radio communications with leaderless, shot-up Charlie Tiger were minimal, and the mood was tense. When the two platoons reached Nhi Ha’s northeast corner, Smith dropped into a bomb crater and deployed his platoon to the right across the dry paddy. The men occupied old trenches
or moved in behind hedgerows. The NVA were entrenched in a hedgerow in front of them.

Enemy fire became thick as more NVA ran up singly and in pairs to reinforce that position. Lieutenant Smith, very concerned about a possible counterattack, cut loose with his CAR15. The platoon’s four-man machine-gun team also opened fire from the crater, and M79 men tried to lob rounds into the enemy trench.

While Alpha Two secured the right flank, Lieutenant Kimball and Alpha Three worked their way into Nhi Ha under stray fire from Charlie Tiger’s fight to the front and from the occasional NVA artillery round that impacted amid the hootches and hedgerows. One shell slammed in beside Kimball and his platoon sergeant, SSgt. George L. Dale, but it failed to explode. The dud sat half-submerged in the sandy soil, and Kimball and Dale joked about their good luck. Moving on, the platoon halted in the cover of a tree line. There was heavy fire to the front. Kimball was lying in some bushes with Sgt. James L. Stone, the point squad leader, trying to figure out how to cross the next open area, when a GI from Charlie Tiger, the first they’d seen, made his way over to them. The trooper had a battle dressing wrapped around his head. “All of our guys are pinned down,” he told the reinforcements as he pointed across the open area. “We got a bunch of dead and wounded across that paddy there, over ’round that blown-up house.”

The wounded trooper wanted to lead them across, but Lieutenant Kimball said, “You’ve already been through it. Just stay here on this side.”

Kimball then told Sergeant Stone to take his squad across the hundred-meter-wide clearing. American artillery fire was tearing up the left flank beyond the hootch. They could see dirt and trees flying in the air. Stone, who was getting increasingly upset, said, “My God, tell ’Em to lift that fire—we can’t go into that!” Kimball got the arty shifted, and Stone got his fire teams organized. He wanted Sp4 Ron Nahrstadt’s team to go first, followed by Sp4 Terry H. Alderson’s, but Alderson chose that moment to tell Stone that he had injured his knee during their up-and-down rush across the last clearing. Stone
didn’t believe him. Alderson was a good soldier and a good friend, but the fear in his eyes was obvious. Alderson’s wife was expecting a baby any day, and he’d been anxiously awaiting each mail call. Everyone in the squad was waiting to see if it would be a boy or a girl. Although angry, Stone didn’t press the issue. He told Alderson to stay back with the other two squads in the tree line, then he put someone else in charge of the team.

Christ, we’re all scared, Stone thought. There isn’t a man among us who isn’t scared as hell. Going first, Stone and Nahrstadt’s team crossed the clearing at a run, then dropped behind a dike near the edge of the tree line. Stone and Nahrstadt were checking things out when three grunts from Charlie Tiger crawled up to them from the left. When Stone explained that they were from Alpha Company, one of them exclaimed, “Oh God, are we glad to see you guys! Man, the gooks are
everywhere!”

Moving on to the demolished hootch, Sergeant Stone’s squad linked up there with the only two GIs still on their feet. They looked scared. The wounded lay behind the shattered walls of the cement building. Stone got his fire teams fanned out to provide security, and Lieutenant Kimball came up with Doc Richards, the platoon medic. They worked fast. Anybody who could lend a hand helped get the wounded onto poncho litters, then they started back the way they had come. They took no enemy fire, but at one point some M79 rounds landed near the hootch courtesy of the Charlie Tiger GIs on the other side of the thick brush to the left. After some hollering back and forth the fire stopped.

Privates Fulcher and Fletcher of Charlie Two were best friends. They were redheaded country boys who could have passed for brothers. Fulcher was from Iowa, and Fletcher from Arkansas. They were both draftees, and both were awarded the BSMv for their actions at Nhi Ha. When the word was passed to pull back with their wounded, Fulcher looked at his buddy and said, “Doug, I’m not leaving Rich out there.”

Private First Class Richard M. Gallery was dead, but
Fletcher knew just what his buddy was feeling. “Let’s go get him,” he replied.

Rich Gallery was lying about twenty-five meters from the cover of their three-sided hootch. He had apparently been hit in the opening moments of the ambush. He was lying on his back, propped up by his rucksack. His helmet had been knocked off and his right arm was flung across his chest. Fulcher and Fletcher squatted down to cover themselves with a couple of M16 bursts, then they rushed to Gallery. Fletcher handed his M16 to Fulcher and knelt down to unstrap Gallery’s pack so they wouldn’t have to carry that, too. Gallery had been shot right below the hollow in his throat.

Just as Fletcher got the dead man’s pack off, the NVA opened fire on them. Both of the M16s in Fulcher’s hands were set on automatic and, firing them at the same time, he squeezed off both magazines. He then reached down to grab Gallery’s right arm and help Fletcher hustle him back—and was shocked to realize how stiff the arm was. It was frozen in position across Gallery’s chest. It was Fulcher’s first experience with rigor mortis, and he thought with horrified wonderment that if he’d had the strength he could carry Gallery’s body like a bucket, using the arm as a handle.

When the crater full of Charlie Two survivors finally made it to safety, it was time for everyone to pull out. The level of NVA fire had decreased, but Staff Sergeant Goad and Sergeant Starr of Charlie Three kept blasting away to cover the men around them who were moving back one at a time. Johnny Miller and George Cruse were sprawled in the open in front of the mound, and Sergeant Coulthard argued with Goad. “We can’t go—John and George are still out there!” Coulthard felt like a coward for not trying to get them. Goad said they were dead, and when Coulthard asked if he was sure, Goad glared at him and snapped, “Goddamnit, they
are
dead—and we’re pullin’ out! Move out!”

In case everyone had not gotten the word, Goad, the de facto platoon leader, bellowed one more time that they were pulling back. The senior NCO who was the platoon leader on
paper suddenly appeared, jumping over some bushes with several other grunts. They were lucky they did not get shot in the confusion. No one at the mound had heard any fire all afternoon from the position on the left where it turned out the sergeant had gone to ground. Goad had assumed he was dead. The platoon was unexcited about his resurrection, given that the sergeant was an overweight, disagreeable, passed-over lifer who was always talking about how much tougher Korea had been than this little war. The sergeant seemed to be just going through the motions until he could retire, and the grunts never forgot that during an earlier supply shortage in the bush he had refused to share his rations.

After taking cover in the depression behind the mound, the sergeant barked at Sp4 Thomas J. Bradford, one of the men who’d come back with him, “Where the hell’s your rucksack?”

“I left it when we pulled back,” said Bradford.

“Well, goddamnit, go back and get it!”

The NVA had ceased firing, but when Bradford got up, they cut loose, hitting him in the chest. Killed instantly, he fell backward almost atop the men in the depression. “It was so sad,” recalled Coulthard. “It was so stupid, so stupid Bradford getting killed.” Coulthard was dumbstruck and enraged that the sergeant had ordered the kid on such a fool’s errand. “What the hell? He didn’t give a shit about the ruck or anything else. He just said it to act like he was in charge again, like there was some semblance of something going on.”

Private First Class Wayne Crist moved out with Bradford’s body, and Goad shouldered Pierre Sullivan’s body as they leapfrogged back toward Charlie One. Starr was the last to pull back from the mound after covering Goad with his M60. Starr got out of there at a run. Joining the tail end of the Charlie Tiger column, Lieutenant Jaquez requested max artillery fire on Nhi Ha when they cleared the ville. The FO was worried about an NY A counterattack as they straggled away. Enemy artillery was firing again, but no one was hit as they loaded the wounded and dead into the Otters that had come up behind them.

Alpha Two and Three pulled back on the right flank.

Charlie Tiger conducted a tense, under-fire retrograde through Delta One and Three, which had come up behind them, then the Otters rolled back to the battalion aid station in Mai Xa Chanh East. Medevacs landed there, their blades kicking up sandstorms. In addition to Barracuda’s one dead and six wounded, Charlie Tiger had eleven dead and eight wounded. It had been a bad day, made no better by the official claim of only fifteen enemy kills. What really hurt was that the bodies of Guthrie, Cruse, and Miller had been left behind.

Meanwhile, Delta One had secured a laager site approximately six hundred meters east of Nhi Ha in what had once been a hamlet. The site was elevated two to three feet above the surrounding rice paddies, so the fields of fire were excellent. By 1800, Alpha Annihilator and the remnants of Charlie Tiger joined up there to form a joint perimeter with Black Death. Barracuda consolidated in the vicinity of Lam Xuan West. Artillery continued to pound Nhi Ha, and Lieutenant Smith of Alpha Two commented that everyone dug deep holes because “they figured it was going to be a wild night. The guys were very much on their toes. They knew exactly where the next hole was, and they knew where their lines of fire were because we went over them three times. I strategically placed my M60 and interlocked our fires, and I paced off our positions. If I had to crawl somewhere in the pitch black I wanted to know exactly where it was.”

“We couldn’t believe what had happened,” recalled Sergeant Coulthard. “We were worn out, just flat worn out. Scared to death. I wanted Captain Leach there bad. The feeling among us was that if he had been there, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Captain Leach, on his way to Australia on R and R, was back at the battalion rear in the main Americal Division base camp at Chu Lai. He was in a transient barracks when a trooper came from the orderly room to wake him. The trooper said that Charlie Tiger had been in heavy contact at a place called Nhi Ha.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Leach exclaimed as he sprang up.

“Sir, they just got the shit kicked out of them.”

Captain Leach found the battalion’s acting sergeant major, who was his former first sergeant. “Jesus Christ, what happened?” he asked. When the former Charlie Tiger topkick told Leach about Lieutenant Guthrie, which was a real blow, the two of them went off and had four or five beers together. Then Leach got his gear organized and radioed ahead to inform the battalion commander that he was canceling his R and R and would come out on the first available helicopter in the morning.

Magnificent Bastards

L
IEUTENANT
C
OLONEL
W
EISE
, CO, BLT 2/4: “A
T NO TIME
during the period 30 April through 2 May was the 320th NVA Division blocked from the north. BLT 2/4 was not reinforced during the battle, but the enemy continued to reinforce his units and to replace his casualties. Thus, the enemy became stronger while BLT 2/4 became weaker from casualties and exhaustion.”

Less than ninety minutes after E and H BLT 2/4 had been forced back from Dinh To with heavy casualties on 2 May 1968, F and G BLT 2/4 were advancing from Dai Do for the next assault. The order had come from Colonel Hull, CO, 3d Marines, who was himself responding to instructions from division. BLT 2/4 was to seize Dinh To and then Thuong Do, which sat on the eastern bank of the tributary that drained into the Bo Dieu River. An ARVN mechanized infantry battalion in position near Dong Lai, opposite Dai Do, was to simultaneously advance up the western bank of the creek to seize Thuong Nghia, which was opposite Thuong Do. The tributary was to serve as the boundary between BLT 2/4 and the ARVN. It was a simple, straightforward plan, but an unrealistic one. The number of NVA on the battlefield was simply overwhelming.

Lieutenant Colonel Weise, CO, BLT 2/4: “We were in no condition for another assault, and I had so informed Colonel Hull. When the assault commenced, I moved close to the forward elements to let my exhausted Marines know I would be with them when the bullets started to fly. I tried to encourage them and talk to them. I told them I was very proud of what they were doing.”